


Yuri!!! On Ice Sketchbook

by evil_whimsey



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-09-27 00:50:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9942818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_whimsey/pseuds/evil_whimsey
Summary: Short bits of frankly plotless character sketchwork, because these people deserve all kinds of love.  Character tags are liable to accumulate, as I hope to try exploring different voices.





	1. the sunset over the box house hills

Victor Nikiforov was tired.

No, correction: Victor Nikiforov was _weary_. Tired was how he felt, getting up in the morning. Tired was tilting heavy and sore into his bed at night. Or slipping his bruised and swollen feet into his shoes, his legs and lower back still thrumming with high circulation, and the sweat chilling between his shoulderblades, after practice.

Weary was how his life felt. Sitting on the sofa and keeping his feet elevated, scrolling through his phone while the heating pad loosened up his left hamstring, and his prepackaged dietitian-approved dinner heated in the oven. Weary was reviewing his calendar: coaching hours, press event thing, practice hours, promotional appearance, barre class, another press thing, blah blah blah.

At this point in his career, as with most world-class athletes, Victor was not so much a person, as an enterprise. A symbol of pride to Russia and the ISU, and a lucrative commodity all over. And Victor had long understood that this was how the bargain worked. To make a champion took more than raw talent and crushing effort, it took considerable resources. The coaching, the ice time, the sports therapists, the travel budget, competition fees, the custom skate boots and costumes. Yes, in some respects he lived a charmed life that an average person could only imagine. But every day he bore the obligation to earn it, by going out and being the Legend, the Hero, the gracious and flawless Champion both on and off the ice. His performance in all those respects couldn't allow for any fault or misstep. An icon wasn't permitted to have off-days, and no matter how tired he got, he must never let it show where anyone could see.

There were few days when being Victor Nikiforov wasn't work. Days when he had the ice to himself, no audience or demanding coach, no immediate obligations. Just the chill air on his face, and that clean frozen canvas running sleek and effortless under his feet. It was the rarest indulgence, hoarded like a guilty pleasure: to be only himself, unscripted, unscheduled, across the whole wide echoing space of an empty rink.

For a long time, that was enough to sustain and soothe him. He could go to the ice as one goes to the bosom of their dearest family. The sort that gave comfort unconditionally. The environment that always reassured a person that they belonged, and where the belonging was natural. It wasn't a process, or a regimen, or a contest. It simply was. Victor mostly knew about that sort of family from books and movies, but he could still seek refuge in that place, where it was just him and the ice, and he could escape everything in dreaming up stories, written into intricate programs, and eventually the best of those stories could be carried out into the world, through contest and exhibition.

He was good at those stories. He was, arguably, the best in all the world. But no well is bottomless, and tapped too much, they all run dry eventually. Victor had the training and experience to coast along quite awhile without inspiration. He was aware of that. He was also aware that coasting without inspiration wasn't enough, it wasn't what he was about, and to give up the struggle for growth in artistry and innovation, would be a betrayal of his storytelling, and all that he had loved about skating, all his life. 

Every season, and lately every day on the competition circuit, he became more conscious of age. Of his body exacting a toll for the strain he'd put on it all these years. Just putting his feet on the floor, first thing in the morning, was an ordeal of patience and pain tolerance. His daily stretching took longer, his warmups required more care to stubborn stiff places in his muscles and joints. 

When he was facing a challenge, the aches and pains he nursed didn't matter so much. But without some definable goal in front of him, or that grit of determination that braced and focused him, it was much harder. And the real challenges were coming few and far between, lately. There were his friends and rivals on the competitive rosters, always straining forward to reach him, and Victor took some motivation from that. But the difficult thing about being at the top for as long as he had, was that he must always be the one to push himself forward, to keep setting his own standards higher, each time. There was no one above him to look up to; he could only strive for a level that didn't yet exist, and create it out of his own imagination.

And his imagination was feeling less spirited every day. He dragged back home to St. Petersburg after Worlds, and all the press, and the end-of-season events, more exhausted than ever in his life. Those last hours of smiling for cameras, fans, and benefactors had taken everything he had left. And as he lay sprawled on his sofa in his dark flat, with Makkachin cuddled warm and happy across him, Victor tipped his head back, the silence of his living room deafening after months of noise.

And he thought: What am I doing?

It was a moment of blank disorientation he'd never known. Or--suspecting this had been creeping up on him for some time--perhaps he'd never let himself feel, until that moment. What was his life? What did he even want, anymore? In the past, he'd put these awful dreary end-season episodes down to fatigue, or the post-competition adrenaline crash, usually fixed with a good night's sleep, a dose of vitamins and a few days off to recuperate. 

But on that particular night, sleep didn't want to come. He dragged himself off the sofa and took Makkachin out for a late walk in the empty streets, light snow spiraling down in the haze of dusky orange street lights. His steps gritted on the pavement, his left knee muttered vague familiar complaints. He sat down on a cold park bench, and imagined a vacation. Ibiza, or Athens. Somewhere with sun. Or he could head back to training in a few days, slipping into the routine of two decades, a schedule so ingrained he could follow it for weeks on autopilot, just showing up and scarcely having to think.

It wouldn't be terribly hard, but the very idea made him shudder. He knew he had work to be getting on with. There were those short programs he'd been sketching out, the musical arrangements waiting on his choice. But in the place within himself where he usually cared about the work, there was only a listless, empty question: _why bother_?

He was aware this was a dangerous question to ask. Even more worrisome, was that he couldn't find a ready answer.

Back in his flat, he slumped down on the sofa with Makkachin again and scrolled absently through his phone, wondering how one might look up answers to profoundly isolating existential problems. His calendar wasn't any help, that was just falling back on habit. He thought about phrasing the question to Google, and then thumbed over to social media instead. Maybe one of his contacts was having a better night than he.

There was some skating video trending, apparently with his name attached. Generally Victor avoided his own name in the tags, unless he wanted to check the temperature on his press and reviews. But this wasn't a video of him. It was....good lord, Katsuki Yuuri? Featured in some phonecam footage on an otherwise empty rink, and from what Victor could make out, not making a terrible mess of Victor's own free skate program.

For the first time, in quite a long time, Victor was intrigued. 

The performance was by no means flawless, but Victor knew the technical difficulty intimately, and wasn't put off. In fact, he was drawn in by the nuance of Katsuki's skating, the sensitivity to gesture and timing. He was visibly out of shape, and Victor winced at the jumps; the extra weight the man carried would be hell on his knee and hip joints, it definitely wasn't sustainable. But Katsuki was throwing himself into it anyway, making it work, giving himself completely to the expressiveness of the program, as much as he was capable of. It was clear he'd grasped the emotion of the story Victor had made, and despite the shortcomings, Victor found himself riveted, so very _awake_ in a way he hadn't felt in ages.

There was no soundtrack to the video, but the silence of the flat fell away as the music sang in Victor's memory, with all that yearning he'd brought to every performance, how he'd reached out through the tenor's voice, calling for a hand to grasp his own. Katsuki skated closer to the camera, reaching toward him, and Victor breathed, " _Oh,_ " as some tight-gripped thing came dislodged in him, like his heart had taken its first hard beat after ages of stillness.

He replayed the video over and over, until his phone battery died, and every time it was the same. Katsuki skating in, beckoning toward Victor, and Victor's heart saying, _Oh. Oh, finally._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title courtesy of ["Sunflower Sutra"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/49304), by Allen Ginsberg


	2. Off Ice Training

Yuri Plisetsky instinctively distrusted people as insanely cheerful as that Thai skater, Chulanont. But there was no denying the guy had a superior Instagram game. And when he started up that hashtag challenge,  **#offtheicetraining** , with a photo from a dance class, and people bending in directions that classical ballet had never imagined, Yuri scowled, because it made him think.

He wasn't totally sure what he was thinking, until Ass Man Giacometti piped up on the tag with himself (of course) wearing something indecent (no surprise there), and pulling a move on a dance pole that made Yuri chuck his phone at the rug. Mostly because of the hip turnout on that move, which Yuri had struggled with briefly and gotten tsked at in barre class, only yesterday. Fuck that guy, for having mile-long legs and making it look easy.

Naturally it got worse: Supreme Shithead J.J. Leroy had to contribute, of fucking course he did, with a stupid montage of his squat routine in the gym, a shot of him leaping up for the hoop to dunk a basketball, and  _what the hell,_ was that a karate uniform he was wearing, smiling his stupid face off? Christ, what a tool.

The only upside, was that following that silly bullshit, that sentimental slop of wet bread Nikiforov's contribution was totally anticlimactic. Yuri already knew about the ACL strain the idiot had given himself, trying for a quad Axel in his comeback to Euro championships. He had also, thanks to the curse of close proximity to Soppy Wet Bread and his fiance Katsudon, gotten to enjoy the sublime bitching out over Skype that Nikiforov got from Katsudon's old teacher, Minako. It had been a bright spot in a gloomy season for Yuri, and he intended to cherish it forever.

The result of Minako's lecture, was that Victor had gotten his ass into a yoga studio, as soon as the doctors had cleared him (Katsudon tagging along in solidarity), and by the looks of them both, had been getting their asses handed to them, trying to do insane twisty poses with names that begged to be made fun of. Katsudon had invited Yuri to come try it out with them, and Yuri wasn't too stupid to see that Soppy Bread was at least getting some benefit out of it. But Yuri had refused on principle. He got enough exposure to their nauseating behavior in rink practice, he had to draw the line somewhere.

Anyway, Victor's contribution to the tag was a sappy shot of him (taken no doubt by his sappy fiance, honestly those two had no dignity), sporting his deranged happy married face and doing one of those weird floor poses, in some ratty old studio.

The other entries on the tag were negligible; skaters in the gym, skaters out for a jog, skaters at the ballet barre. This was all crap that Yuri was doing already, and anyone with eyes could tell how that was working out. At the moment, he was nursing four new blisters on his feet, because he was breaking in new running shoes and new skate boots at the same time. Not to mention tripping over the toe of the damn running shoes, which was goddamn humiliating, every time it happened. It was ludicrous, how his lazy traitor brain couldn't manage to keep track of his body's growth. Shouldn't it just know how long his legs were now? That's what brains were for, right?

Sara Crispino posted to  **#offtheicetraining**  with a shot of her kickboxing class. Which okay, yeah, Yuri could definitely get on board with that. But then he imagined pitching the idea to Yakov and Lilia, and the ensuing screamfest, and decided to maybe shelve that one for awhile. Wait until he wasn't tangling up his feet and eating shit on his jumps anymore, and try bargaining from a position of strength.

Two weeks passed. During which time, Yuri broke in the new skate boots, his blisters calloused up, he finished a 5k run without wanting to vomit, tripped over his stupid shoes seven times, nearly rolled his ankle in ballet, and took a spectacular wipeout on his quad Sal. The takeoff on it sucked, he knew it immediately, and then the landing was an utter flaming trainwreck. He hit the ice on his side, hard enough that he saw nothing but white for awhile, thanks to 60% pain, and 80% rage that he couldn't suck enough air into his lungs to scream out his feelings.

To make it worse, the first voice he could make sense of, was Katsudon. Saying, "You're okay, take it slow." Catching Yuri's leg when he tried to hack the heel of his blade into the ice in his sudden fury (and yeah, Yakov would've skinned him for kicking a hole in the ice like that, just on a tantrum, but  _fuck everything_  he was so done).

"Hands off, pig," he growled, too aware of the stillness and scrutiny of everyone else on the rink. He shoved himself up, already feeling where the newest bruises would bloom, and too hot in his skull to care.  
Katsuki, who was not as stupid as he looked, had backed off a foot, though still on one knee, on the ice. "You could take some time out," he mentioned.

"Like hell I can," Yuri told him. He'd been watching Katsuki's wipeouts for years, until the guy finally got his shit together. And he'd seen Katsuki in practice for long enough, to know that his falls on jumps weren't due to any lack of serious effort. The guy might not have his head together, but he was fucking unbreakable; every time he just got back up, and threw himself into it again. There was no way Yuri could do anything less.

Now, Katsuki just shrugged mildly at him. "Okay. But this isn't a problem you fix in a day." Tipping his head to Yuri's still stiff and clean new boots. "Don't let it wear you down."

Yuri wanted to scream at him, but before he could find the words, Katsuki was up and stroking off back toward his own practice, and then, like a barn door falling down and scattering a yard full of chickens, Yakov's shouting came at him in full volume, demanding Yuri come off for a break. Yuri then realized that every bit of him ached , and his ass was soaking wet and freezing, and one way or another he had to get up and move.

That night, after a scalding hot bath in Epsom salts (with a side of resentful and begrudging nostalgia for Katsuki's family onsen) he spied a new entry on the training hashtag.

**otabek-altin #offtheicetraining  
237 likes 1 comment**

Yuri stared at the photo for awhile, puzzled. Ignoring the twinge in his bruised shoulder, he tried zooming the photo bigger, and peering at it. Otabek and a bunch of old people, everybody dressed in what looked like black pajamas, with black slippers, out in some park.

Yuri had so many questions. Not the least of which, were what kind of sports training let you wear pajamas in a park, and how did Otabek not look stupid in them. Hoping for some kind of hint, Yuri pulled up the single comment. It was that skater from China, Guang-Hong Ji.

**+guanghongji+  
Tai Chi Chuan!**

The comment was followed by a scattering of pleased and enthusiastic emoji, and basically answered one of Yuri's questions while piling on several more. He thought about chucking his phone again, but he was tired, and his throwing arm was pretty much wasted, so he pulled up Youtube instead, to do some research.


	3. Moves in the field

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Note: This one was a prompt fic, from a grab-bag random prompt game I had going with [PandoraCulpa](http://archiveofourown.org/users/PandoraCulpa/pseuds/PandoraCulpa). I got Wallace Stevens, and for once didn't write something about Morinozuka Takashi.

_O thin men of Haddam,_  
_Why do you imagine golden birds?_  
_Do you not see how the blackbird_  
_Walks around the feet_  
_Of the women about you?_

\-- Wallace Stevens [Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (Stanza 7)]

 

Yuuri Katsuki didn't expect that people would notice his skating. He _hoped_ , but he didn't expect it. Phichit understood this, because he'd been in close company with Yuuri for awhile, what with being college roommates and all.

And maybe it was a result of Yuuri's expectations, that people generally didn't notice him. Yuuri had this tendency to keep his head down, both at school and on the ice. He worked, and kept to himself, and shied away from attention to such an extent that unless you watched him every day (which Phichit could hardly avoid), you'd never realize just how hard he worked, or the inexhaustible focus he put into everything he did.

Phichit had tried keeping up a few times, when Yuuri was doing his usual compulsory edge-work, figures, the painstaking slow-motion precursor to his frankly incredible program footwork. Phichit tried it, because he thought he might learn something--either about Yuuri, or about how to improve his own footwork in general. What he mostly learned was that he himself was good for about 20 minutes of Yuuri's slow figure regimen before his legs were trembling too hard to cleanly pull off a backward inside 3-turn, while Yuuri was still good for another half-hour of patient exacting perfectionism. Phichit would've suspected the guy of having robot legs or something, but he lived with Yuuri. Had seen him changing clothes, going in and out of the shower. All his parts were ordinary human parts. They were not what was extraordinary about him.

One person who noticed Yuuri was their coach, Celestino. Phichit had been taking a break during practice one day, to chug some water and re-tie his skates, while Yuuri was still carving architecturally perfect shapes, off at the end of the rink. It was almost certainly dumb luck, that Phichit happened to be the person that Celestino chose to talk to.

"You see the time he puts into form and fundamentals? That's how you master footwork. Do it until every move is easy as breathing. Once you can breathe something, you can do anything. You can sing."

Celestino didn't say this with a lot of hope, though, Phichit thought. Possibly because, while Yuuri certainly had the capability to sing on the ice, in any key you might choose (and they'd all seen it, in his program practice sessions), all that easy limber melody of his body always seemed to dry up, in competition.

The first time Phichit had seen it happen, it had shocked him. He'd watched Yuuri on a livestream from Salt Lake City, struggling to hold together programs that Phichit had personally seen him bleed for, and deliver faultlessly in practice. And then the rest of the qualifying competitions on the way to the Grand Prix, scraping through by the skin of his teeth, when he should've been breaking records in the presentation score all the way. 

First Phichit was baffled, and then furious at nothing he could name. All he wanted for himself, was to skate for Thailand, to bring the love and enthusiasm he felt on the ice, back to the people of his country, so that they could be inspired, and discover this same love. But in all the time he'd spent watching, and trying to match the level of Yuuri's skating (on Yuuri's better days), Phichit felt certain that Yuuri's potential was something so much greater than one country could hold or aspire to. 

Never mind all the people carrying on about Nikiforov and Giacometti and Leroy, Yuuri Katsuki had something he'd never seen in any of those guys. 

And either that potential hadn't yet been tapped, or the conditions for it to flourish hadn't quite arrived yet. Phichit wasn't sure; he wasn't a coach or a psychologist, just a skater and a friend. But still, he had this feeling, every bit as strong as his own dreams. That if his quiet, introverted, hardworking roommate could ever pull it all together, he could leave the most gorgeous mark on the world, and on skating history.


End file.
